What Will My Spy Be? Capitalist, Drone, Deviant...
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: February 16, 2007
When John le Carré appropriated a nursery rhyme for his 1974 book about spies and spy-catchers, he borrowed just three words, “tinker, tailor, soldier,” then sexed up the whole thing by adding a fourth word, “spy.” The new film “Breach,” about the F.B.I. counterintelligence agent Robert Philip Hanssen, who sold secrets to the Soviet Union and later Russia for more than two decades, suggests that it’s time to dust off the rest of that same rhyme: “rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.” Now in prison, where he’s serving a life sentence, Mr. Hanssen was a little of each; he was also greedy, pathetic, malevolent — a creep’s creep.
In the spring of 2002, an assistant director at the F.B.I. explained Mr. Hanssen’s success as a spy this way: “Succinctly put, security, other than physical security, was not inculcated into the culture as a priority that must be practiced, observed and improved upon every day.” No kidding. For many of the 25 years he worked at the F.B.I., he covertly thrived in that culture, like a stealth malignancy. On the February 2001 morning of his arrest, he attended Mass at a Roman Catholic church where the services were in Latin and many in the congregation belonged to Opus Dei. Later that day, he dropped a garbage bag stuffed with intelligence secrets in a Virginia park not far from his home.
One of the strengths of “Breach,” a thriller that manages to excite and unnerve despite our knowing the ending, is how well it captures the utter banality of this man and his world. Unlike Kim Philby, an aristocratic figure who swanned across the world while passing classified British and American information to the Soviets, Mr. Hanssen, played by the stellar Chris Cooper, comes across as a middle manager type, a drone in a suit. The real double agent practiced his tradecraft in Washington and New York, not Cairo and Istanbul, and delivered the goods — more than 6,000 pages — in garbage bags secured with tape. With his weekend casuals and Ford Taurus, he might have been just another suburban dad bagging leaves.
The director Billy Ray, who wrote the screenplay with Adam Mazer and William Rotko, uses a young agent-in-training, Eric O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe), to jimmy his way into the story. (The real Mr. O’Neill, now a lawyer, served as a consultant on the film, which helps explains why it feels true in tone and texture.) Shortly before Mr. Hanssen was caught, the bureau assigned Mr. O’Neill to work for him. The younger man had been told only that Mr. Hanssen was a sexual deviant (he had some freaky habits), not that he was a turncoat....Mr. Ray doesn’t do much with the camera, but his no-frills, almost generic visual style suits the subject. In contrast to the world of shadows and mystery Robert De Niro fashions for “The Good Shepherd,” his origin story about the C.I.A., Mr. Ray serves up a bland, anonymous corporation, one in which organizational rivals bitterly compare offices, and shrink-wrapped computers sit stacked in the harshly lighted halls. It’s “The Office” without the jokes; Kafka without the soul. In other words, it’s the F.B.I., stripped of the usual movie-made gloss....
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/16/movies/16brea.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin
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